Would You Play a Game That Had No Challenge?

Posted on May 17th, 2012

This post is part one in a series of two.

So a couple of months back, when I went to hear Anna Anthropy talk at the NYU Game Center, I got into a brief conversation with her about the notion of challenge and whether or not it was necessary to games.

challenges in games - mountain climbing

Games can be challenging. Like climbing mountains. But with less risk of frostbite.

She had noticed a trend among the minority of folks hating on her game dys4ia, namely that people, particularly dudes, seemed uncomfortable with the fact that there was no way to lose the game and there was no element of challenge against which they could bash their manly egos.

I don’t want to go into to much detail about that conversation because I’d likely just misattribute something to her by accident, but it got me thinking about whether challenge is an essential component of games.

To kick off this conversation, I thought it would be useful to provide a few definitions of games by various thinkers in the field:

“Games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.” – Jane McGonigal

She phrases it better and in more detail in her book Reality is Broken but this definition works for now because I was able to Google it and if memory serves it’s not far off base.

“Telling us something, anything. Making me feel a connection.” – Anna Anthropy

She said this in my Games for Change interview with her on what makes games worthwhile. In her book, she delineates games as an experience moderated by rules, a definition proudly and admittedly wide enough to drive a truck through.

“Playing a game is the act of solving statistically varied challenge situations presented by an opponent who may or may not be algorithmic within a framework that is a defined systemic model.” – Raph Koster

For more details, read his post on why some digital interactive art should not be called a game.

A game is a “competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.” – Dictionary.com

Okay so it’s not a thinker in the field but it’s an interesting definition to rip into a bit.

McGonigal’s definition makes perfect sense for her approach to games as vehicles for change. It highlights the uneccessary nature of the challenge in games, and yet, rather than thinking of that characteristic as a badge of their frivolity, she sees as their pathway towards a greater purpose.

Koster’s definition is a tight, nugget of text that seems limiting and hard to penetrate at first, but he makes the case that it’s actually pretty inclusive. He notes that it allows for people who turn “interpersonal relationships, or the stock market, or anything else into ‘a game,’” and the more you try to apply it to various scenarios the broader you discover it is.

n64-game controller

With apologies to Rene Magritte: Ceci n'est pas une "game"

Dictionary.com’s defintion is laughable in some ways, the most glaring of which is the  fact that it excludes one-player games from its definition. But this description of what constitutes a game is interesting precisely because it comes from a source distinctly outside the industry.

Do all games have to be for amusement? Clearly not. You could even wedge bullying into this definition of a game. With regards to challenge, this definition sets up skill, chance, and endurance as the sources of this challenge, but I’ll touch on that more in the second part of this post.

Interestingly, but not so surprisingly, Anthropy’s definition is the outlier in terms of omitting challenge as a central element of a game. I get the sense that this connects to her upset over the insularity of the gaming industry. The distinction that’s often made between casual gamers and hardcore gamers is not the amount of time they commit (if you add up the hours so called “casual” gamers log on Bejeweled or Spell Tower it could probably give some WoWers a run for their money) but their fluency in the in-speak, memes, codes, and rituals of the video game industry.

In that way, challenge can be, and is, used as a barrier to entry that keeps certain games from being accessible to certain people. And yet there are many different types of challenge, which I will go into further in the second part of this post.

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My First Digital Game for Change

Posted on May 3rd, 2012
eating_animals_screenshot games for change

A screenshot from my first Scratch game: Eating Animals.

So I’ve added a new section to the site that I hope to flesh out over time. I’ll be uploading games for change that I make, initially using Scratch, but later on other game making platforms as well. This first game is called Eating Animals, and I got the idea to make it while reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name.

The game has a simple whack-a-mole style setup and it takes less than a minute to play, so there’s no reason not to check it out. The player is given a fork and a knife and tasked with killing and eating a bunch of chickens. My hope was that the game would simultaneously a) highlight the gap between how animals look when they’re alive and how they arrive on our plates and b) make players complicit in killing the meat that they eat, if only digitally.

There are still some aspects that are a little buggy, but it was time for me to call the project finished and move on to the next one. While I was exploring the Scratch program, a cool feature that I discovered is that you can have in-game characters and objects respond to Arduino-like external sensors in the real world. This seems like it would be more appropriate for an art installation than for a game you want to upload to the web and make available for people to play, but it’s still a feature I’d like to toy around with in the future.

My two main takeaways from the process of creating this game were 1) don’t allow myself to get hung up on art and sound clips, and 2) mapping out the game’s features beforehand will make it much easier to put together than adding and removing features as I go. I wanted to add something as simple as a skip button in case players wanted to bypass the intro scene with the talking chickens, but I ended up shuffling a lot of things around to try and make it work, which in turn threw off other elements of the game.

If you have any feedback on Eating Animals, please leave it in the comments section, and thanks for playing.

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Words With Strangers: a Post-Mortem

Posted on April 22nd, 2012

words-with-friends-games-for-changeSo about a month ago, I came up with a concept for making Words With Friends into a game for change using the in-game messaging to share positive messages and kind words with strangers. After a brief life, I’m ready to pronounce the game dead and begin looking at some of the design flaws and alternate ways of approaching a similar concept.

The biggest problem I encountered when I started trying to play was so fundamental, I’m a bit embarrassed: when messaging complete strangers it is hard to know what to say. Like one of those people who hawks flyers for comedy clubs or sandwich shops on the street, I resorted to a wide array of tactics hoping to spark an interaction.

As a result, I probably came across as the digital equivalent of a mad panhandler; a frothy-mouthed fellow one would as soon cross the street to avoid as look in the eye. I think one thing that would have helped with this is if I hadn’t set the restriction of not talking about the game itself. Given that I knew nothing else about my opponents beyond any clues provided by their usernames, and a shared interest in word games, talking about that shared interest seems like the most logical way to start a conversation.

And this reveals another conflict within the design: if the goal is to share a positive message with someone, something out of the ordinary to brighten their day, getting a response might not be the best measure of how effective it was. The only reason I was trying to elicit responses was because I conceived of it as a form of “scorekeeping” that would prompt less utilitarian interactions than some sort of numeric system, but it seems that was a mistake.

In the month since I created Words With Strangers, I came across another initiative that was using games and social media to promote positive experiences. As Israeli and Iranian leaders engaged in a war of words surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of a violent conflict, one Israeli graphic designer, Ronny Edry, decided to take the conversation out of the hands of governments and put it in the hands of Israel’s citizenry.

Edry created a Facebook page simply titled “Israel Loves Iran,” which spurred tens of thousands of Israelis, and many Iranians, though the numbers are less reliable, to come together and express their hope that their countries not go to war. A Tel-Aviv based start-up, called Rounds, that provides a hangout platform on Facebook where people can play games together, took the idea behind the “Israel Loves Iran” page a step further by creating a version of their product specifically designed to match up Israelis and Iranians.

So even with that limited tidbit of information, knowing the country where the person you’re playing a game against lives, can color even simple, positive interactions as more profound given the diplomatic relationship between the two countries.

Another issue with Words With Strangers is that since there was no copy function within the in-game messaging platform, anyone who wanted to play Words With Strangers would have to manually transcribe the interactions they had, a process so tedious as to be prohibitive.

I’m still interested in using the word cloud as a component of a future game, but I think it might work better as part of a text-based adventure game. Part of the fun of those games, aside from using your imagination to create your surroundings, is trying to figure out what actions your character is allowed to take. I think it might be revealing to the player to see a word cloud of the actions they took most at the conclusion of the game, and it would be telling given the broad palette of verbs in the English language, how they attempted to handle a particular situation.

Right now I’m focusing on making games in Scratch, but the next game making platforms I want to try my hand at afterwards are Twine and Inform 7, which are good for creating text-based games. There’s still the challenge of pulling the player’s entries from the game into the word cloud creator, but maybe I can collaborate with someone on that aspect of the game.

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Making Change an Optional Feature

Posted on April 12th, 2012
god of blades - games for change

A screenshot from one of God of Blades' optional library check ins.

Sometimes from amid the competing klaxons of opinion on the Internet, a voice of reason emerges like Lisa Simpson’s bleating saxophone in band class. And when you hear the voice, or read the words as it were, your body unslacks in its chair and you nod along as you read, even if there’s no one in the room with you, because of the pleasure of finding someone in the digital entropy on the same wavelength as you.

This is a long-winded way of saying that when I read about a game called God of Blades a couple of months back, I wondered to myself, “why aren’t more people doing stuff like this?”

As I understand it from the trailer, and naturally from the name, the game involves a lot of swordfighting, but if you poke around the website for long (the Desktop and iOS RPG sidescroller is still in development) you’ll quickly see that this is not your typical stabfest.

Players of GoB take on the role of a ghost who defends his dying world with swords made of memories. In the process, according to the game’s website, “God of Blades asks players to think about memory, culture, and loss in terms of stories, books, and the communities that love them. What happens to us when our stories disappear? What if we could stop it?”

god of blades 2 - games for change

Another screenshot of the gameplay in God of Blades.

At this point, what color am I? I am intrigued. But the post that first brought the game to my attention gets better. It details how the team wanted to capitalize on the GPS capabilities that their mobile players would have, so they built check-ins into the game that unlock gnarly new swords; and given the themes the game deals with, players get these tasty bonus features by visiting libraries.

Check-ins are not uncommon in mobile games, and even using current technology to get people to engage with libraries has been done before (cf. the New York Public Library’s Find the Future game) but the part that I most enjoyed was the way the game’s designers chose to incorporate this feature into the game.

“We must stress, of course, that checking into libraries is totally optional, doesn’t cost the player any money, and won’t affect the play experience for those who don’t care to use it,” write the creators.

Is this how games for change can avoid being ghettoized? Just bake an optional feature into a game with more mainstream appeal? I’ll be interested to check back with the creators once the game goes live to see how and how often people use the game’s library-related features. What other mainstream games do you think are ripe for this sort of serious games injection?

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When Games for “Change” Need Scare Quotes

Posted on April 6th, 2012

trash tycoon games for changeIn my first post on this blog, I wrote that I’m not picky about what kind of change a game is trying to create. It’s terrific when a game tackles meaty, large-scale problems like global poverty or pollution, but that’s no reason to write off a game that operates at a more nitty gritty, interpersonal level, say one that gets people to have conversations with their kids about race, or pick up the phone and call a lonely stranger (like Jane McGonigal’s game Bounce).

That said I sometimes feel that the “change” aspect in certain games for change requires scare quotes. This is, of course, usually an issue of how the game is funded. For a number of reasons, games are often viewed as marketing vehicles rather than ends in themselves, and when that is the case with a game for change, it can add a certain disingenuousness to its purported social impact.

One example of this is a Facebook game called Trash Tycoon put out by the company Terracycle. For those of you who don’t know, Terracycle is actually a pretty neat company: they started off making worm poop fertilizer and expanded into upcycling packaging from other companies’ products into new goods. This includes collecting everything from old laptops and mp3 players to used wine corks and candy wrappers.

Trash Tycoon is a Farmville-style game in which you pick up different types of trash in a dirty city and create factories that can upcycle it into products that people can use. The fact that the game borrows so heavily from the Farmville vocabulary isn’t my main complaint, I understand that it can sometimes be easier to get people involved in a game when they’re familiar with the layout.

The real problem is that Trash Tycoon shares a feature of many other social media games: you have to pay if you want to play for very long. Whether your character runs out of energy or you need more composting worms, the almighty dollar is sure to interrupt your gameplay.

True 10% of all the money spent in the game goes to Carbonfund.org, and players can vote on which projects they would most like that money to support but a) this is not a very effective way to give to an environmental charity and b) to my mind this detracts from the supposed purpose of the game which is to raise awareness of upcycling (and of course to expose more people to the Terracycle brand).

When I played the game a couple of months ago, it was getting 100,000 monthly users. As of this posting, Facebook says that the game has 40,000 monthly users, which is still nothing to sneeze at. On the off chance that someone from Terracycle comes across this post, I’d like to propose some ways to breathe new life into the game, and take the scare quotes off its social impact in the process.

Cork-Chair-upcylcing

A chair made of corks. Hooray for upcycling!

So what would Trash Tycoon look like if its intended social impact wasn’t laden with raising brand awareness and bringing in revenue? It could be a hub for collaborative grassroots activism, bringing together people who want to change recycling laws or institute upcycling centers in their towns or cities.

An even more interesting possibility, and one that has less potential to threaten Terracycle’s bottom line, is to make a portion of the game where people can share ideas and tutorials for actual upcycling projects. Terracycle could even use this community as a way to crowdsource new product ideas that they could put into production.

These things would not necessarily be games in and of themselves but they would have to be built into the larger mechanics of Trash Tycoon. Not only would a game that looked like this have greater real world impact, but my suspicion is that it would keep players engaged longer because they would have greater agency.

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Anna Anthropy Discusses How Everyone Can Make Games

Posted on March 29th, 2012

So I first came across Anna Anthropy’s game dys4ia in the hullabaloo surrounding GDC, and I have to say I’m glad I did. Not only am I always thrilled to see a game that takes a unique approach in form or subject matter, but if I hadn’t discovered dys4ia, I wouldn’t have discovered other elements of Anthropy’s work, notably her new book. Dys4ia deals with Anthropy’s experiences with hormone replacement therapy and you can read an interview I did with her that focuses more on that game on the Games for Change blog.

video-game-zinesters-games for change

Anthropy’s recently published book, which I discuss with her below, has the attention-grabbing title Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. I hope she won’t think me too cheeky for saying that the message in the title reminds me a bit of Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille, whose characters espoused the idea that everyone can cook, even an anthropomorphic rat voiced by Patton Oswalt. In Anthropy’s case, the contention, and a very valid one I must say, is that everyone can make video games, they need only get up off their duff and stop conflating video games with multi-million dollar, cinematic AAA titles. Here is Anthropy in her own words.

Will Play Games for Change: So I’ll start with the obvious question: how are freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, drop-outs, queers, housewives, and people like me taking back an art form? In less than 208 pages.

Anna Anthropy: By making games outside of a multi-billion dollar publisher system, and thus being entirely unbeholden to lowest common denominator marketability, the existing games culture of consumption and casual misogyny, and maybe, maybe making something that’s a bit more personal and helps us relate to each other a little better as human beings. You know, what an art form is supposed to do.

Will Play Games for Change: What has the response to your book been like so far?

Anna Anthropy: My favorite review of the book has been this one by Rachel Helps.

Her response to the book was to actually make a short, simple game, which is the perfect response that I wanted. It made me smile pretty wide.

Will Play Games for Change: Do you usually work on games alone or collaboratively and why?

Anna Anthropy: I’m a control freak, a mastermind, a classic domme. I only collaborate with people whose spheres of talent don’t overlap with mine. I need music, I need a drawing of a pretty girl being trampled on by a spider queen. I tend to give people I collaborate with a very detailed description of what I want, what my vision is. But I tend not to ask for many changes to what they give me: when I ask someone to collaborate with me, I want the game to be as visibly theirs as mine.

dys4ia-games-for-change

A screenshot from Anthropy's game dys4ia about her experience with hormone replacement therapy.

Will Play Games for Change: You’ve said that “the [games] that don’t come from scenes will be the interesting ones”? Do you feel like there’s a groupthink epidemic in the game industry, and what are some possible antidotes?

Anna Anthropy: Create, create, create. People in online “indie” scenes fall into the trap of fantasizing about game creation rather than doing it. No wonder all their ideas start to look the same. When you’re just making, making, making, you have no choice but to strike out in weird directions and create stuff that’s less meditated. Pursue weird ideas. There is value in creation for its own sake.

Will Play Games for Change: What might a World of Warcraft-scale game that dealt with LGBTQ issues look like?

Anna Anthropy: It probably wouldn’t be about bashing monsters until numbers go up. I expect it could be about negotiation, identity and performance. What codes do players establish to help organize themselves? How can other players subvert and deconstruct those systems? I expect that it would look a lot more like Second Life, in fact, than World of Warcraft. I want to see a queer game that looks like worlds.com.

Will Play Games for Change: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Anna Anthropy: Klik of the month happens the third Saturday of every month at glorioustrainwrecks.com. It’s a perfect opportunity for anyone to get her hands dirty making a game in two (or so) hours. It’s an immensely empowering experience, and the perfect chance to explore all the ideas about creation that I advocate in my book.

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Can Any Game Be Made a Game for Change?

Posted on March 21st, 2012

As much as I enjoy playing games for change, there’s a special place in my personal gamiverse for another sort of game that doesn’t sway minds on any social issue, raise money for a crucial cause, or harness the power of crowds to advance science or technology. Those who know me are already aware that I’m talking about Scrabble.

The British journalist Janet Street Porter once referred to the game as “more addictive than cocaine, group sex, and champagne.” While I’ll have to take her word on the particulars of the comparison, I do find the game highly addictive and definitely spend a lot of time playing and turning it over in my mind, as often happens with addictive games. So when I started mulling ways that games outside of the games for change space could be remade to have a social impact, Scrabble was the first one to come to mind.

Since getting a smartphone, I’ve been strong-armed into playing Scrabble’s bastard cousin, Words With Friends. I could write a whole other post about the deficits of this game, which kneecaps some of the best features of its predecessor. But for all its faults, one distinct advantage of Words With Friends over the Scrabble app is that the chat function is much more prominent, especially in the case of chatting with random opponents.

This was called to my attention the other day when someone I was playing against apologized for not playing in a while and mentioned that he or she had been undergoing chemo recently. Not wanting to pry, but also figuring they wouldn’t have brought it up if they hadn’t wanted to discuss it, I asked this person a few questions about how the treatment was going. We didn’t have a lengthy exchange, but it was a small human connection across a gap of unknown distances.

Periodically, stories of random acts of kindness float to the top of the Internet, because, understandably, they give people a warm feeling. In fact there’s a non-profit called Random Acts of Kindness that’s whole focus is on facilitating and providing ideas to encourage people to do good things for strangers. I only mention this because if you look at the stories on their website of people on both ends of these random acts, it illustrates the difference that even tiny gestures can make; after all, you have no idea what kind of day, week, month, or year the other person is having.

Many people probably already have the occasional interaction with someone they don’t know within Words With Friends. After all, though they’re certainly the exception to the rule, at least two people who met through the game have since gotten married. But when we add a few extra rules about these interactions to Words With Friends, it forms a sort of metagame I’ll call Words With Strangers. The rules are as follows:

  • Start a Words With Friends game with someone you don’t know.
  • Message them inside the game.
  • Say something positive. It can be encouragement, a compliment, or just asking how someone’s doing. As long as it’s intended to make them feel good, or listened to, or appreciated.
  • Talk about something other than the game you’re playing (that includes not discussing Words With Friends or Words With Strangers).
  • Don’t exchange personal information. Players must ultimately remain strangers.
  • Copy your half of the conversation and your opponent’s half into separate documents and, using Wordle, or a similar tool, make them each into a word cloud that grows over time as you play. These word clouds function as a non-numeric “score” and a memento of your gameplay.

games for change - scrabble for cheatersI’m particularly curious about how this scoring mechanism will play out. Will it be too much effort for too little reward in some people’s minds? I wanted to find some way of scoring the game that wouldn’t make people too utilitarian in their conversations with others and having a non-numeric “score” seemed like a good way to do that that would still allow people to compare the experience they had playing. Of course if a particular conversation becomes too personal people are welcome to leave it out, but over time, it would provide lots of insights into the strategies players use to boost others’ spirits and how those people respond.

Words With Strangers calls a number of precedents to mind for me. There is of course Jane McGonigal’s game Cruel 2 B Kind, which turns the game of assassins into a vehicle for spreading good will to strangers and reclaiming public spaces. It also reminds me of 826 NYC’s Scrabble for Cheaters events, which are annual fundraisers put on by the tutoring center / superhero supply store, wherein sponsors buy in-game cheats for the kids who participate in the tournament.

Unfortunately, I just missed Random Kindness Week this year (it falls in mid-February, who knew), which would have been a perfect time to try and launch the game, but I can wait till next year. In the meantime, if anyone tries playing Words With Strangers and has feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if you have ideas about turning other ordinary games into games for change, share those in the comments as well.

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Green Goose is Rich Ground for Games for Change

Posted on March 12th, 2012

So on a recent trip to California, which sadly didn’t coincide with GDC, I popped by a Gaming and Mobile Entrepreneurship Meetup in the Bay Area and got to meet some interesting people, one of whom was Brian Krejcarek. He’s the founder of a company called Green Goose that I’d read about in Wired a while back in a great article about feedback loops that’s worth a peek for anyone doing game design.

Basically, the company makes small stickers that allow you to track your usage of different household objects based on various motions you engage in when using them. For example, you could track how often you brush your teeth or take your dog for a walk, or if you’re having a Frisbee catch with friends, how long you can keep it aloft without dropping it. As Krejcarek told Wired,  “If a behavior has a pattern, if we can calculate a desired duration and intensity, we can create a system that rewards that behavior and encourages more of it.”

Basically, it’s an ARG makers wet dream. What’s more, when I talked to Krejcarek, he said that the company is working on crafting new sensors and that they’re really looking to developers to get their hands dirty with the company’s API and see what kind of interesting stuff they can create.

I’m trying to think of particular games for change applications for these stickers, because while encouraging kids to play with pets and brush their teeth are probably helpful for exasperated parents, they seem a little milquetoast in their ambitions to be labeled games for change.

The website doesn’t have a full list of the available functionalities of the sensors, though they say they have over 100 in development. The most obvious application, and the one that the company was initially more focused on was tracking energy usage of different household appliances.

Also, judging from the pictures of stickers online with basketballs, skateboards, and bicycles on them, there’s a game that promotes physical fitness for kids in there somewhere. Towards that end, I could see a guide for parents to creating obstacle courses for their kids. I used to ask my parents to make those for me all the time but maybe I was the only one. I also notice a book sticker, which could lead to incorporating particular books into scavenger hunts or some other application that would subtly incentivize reading.

Ultimately, I’d like to get in touch with Brian again and interview him in greater detail about the games for change applications that he sees for these stickers but until then, I’d be interested to hear of any examples people are aware of game designers already implementing these stickers.

green goose sensors

Some of the sensors that Green Goose offers on their website as examples of what's in development.

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Games for Change That Help Grownups and Kids Discuss Race

Posted on February 10th, 2012

I recently had the opportunity to interview cultural anthropologist and diversity consultant Michael Baran about two games that he’s worked on that deal with issues of race and identity, called Guess My Race and Who Am I? You can read my interview with him about the Guess My Race quiz game / app on the Games for Change Blog, where Baran expounds on the pain and exhilaration of watching people play test his work, how the media dodges deep analysis of race in favor of discussing Obama’s favorite beer, and how making the player frustrated can ultimately be educational.

Since there was more interesting information in our interview than I could fit into one post, I decided to do a second post here that focused more on the Who Am I? app and where Baran hopes to take the concepts for these games in the future.

WPG4C: In addition to creating the Guess My Race app, you created a similar app called Who Am I?, which is intended to be played by children with their parents. What was behind the decision to create these two separate apps and what are the important differences between them?

MB: Although these two apps both focus on race and identity, they are very different kinds of games. While Guess My Race is intended to be played alone, Who Am I? is inherently a two-player game that demands social interaction. That’s what’s so exciting about that one. Anthropologists are now aware that most white parents do not talk with their children about race; in fact, they conspicuously avoid it. This is often for well-intentioned reasons, as they hope to produce “color-blindness” in their kids.

But we know this is impossible. Kids not only see color, but they also hear about racial categories in the language all around them. And they want to figure it out, from a very early age. So if parents and teachers don’t talk to them about it, they will learn about it from other places, especially the media, and all the problematic ways we currently think about race will be perpetuated in future generations.

We designed Who Am I? so that playing this fun deductive reasoning guessing game (sort of a Guess Who-type game using real pictures), parents have to face tough questions. For example, if the child is playing the game, there are 12 or 24 pictures they are looking at. And if the parent says that the person they selected is Black, the child has to figure out which of those 24 pictures to eliminate. And when you are looking at 24 pictures of real people with real skin colors, it’s not so easy to figure out! So they have to start talking with their parent. But we also know that many parents feel uncomfortable with that, so we have over 70 practical tips for parents to use to start these conversations.

I’ve had parents tell me that they started playing the game, but were too uncomfortable, so they stopped. Then when the kids went to bed, they read through all 70 tips and started playing the next day, from a much more informed place. So the game is not only teaching kids, but also teaching parents, and building a critical communication bridge between parent and child.


WPG4C: By offering these games as smartphone apps, doesn’t that limit the socioeconomic range of people who will have access to them?

MB: For sure, and we are hoping to get some funding soon to make the game web-based as well. But even as an app, there are ways that lots of people without smartphones have been able to play. The app has been exhibited in several museums on iPads where hundreds of thousands of people have been able to play. Also, many teachers, diversity trainers, and religious leaders have used the app in classes and presentations.

WPG4C: If you could envision a World of Warcraft-scale game that dealt with issues of race and identity, what might that look like?

MB: This is an excellent question that I am not going to answer right now. But I’ve got lots of ideas! So if I get my hands on some time and funding, you may see something like this from me in the future.

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Hacking School Recess for a Better Tomorrow

Posted on February 3rd, 2012

Kids playing kickball during recess at a Playworks program in Baltimore, Maryland.

So I came across this nonprofit a few weeks ago called Playworks, and I was shocked that I hadn’t heard of them before, not only because they’ve been around since 1996, and because they operate in 300 schools in 23 cities around the US, but because their work has that quality of sounding like a head-smackingly, intuitively good idea the first time you hear about it. I also thought it would be a nice change to talk about a non-digital game for change initiative.

Basically, Playworks is a national nonprofit that goes into low-income schools all around the country to help kids find safer, healthier, more inclusive ways to play both at recess and throughout the school day. For a more detailed backstory about Playworks’ inception, I recommend CEO and Founder Jill Vialet’s TEDx talk on the need for this kind of organization.

But for those of you who want the quick and dirty version, I’m going to include some numbers from a survey they conducted of over 2,500 educators in the schools where the organization works, to give you a snapshot of the positive impact Playworks is having. Of the teachers and principals they polled:

  • 98% reported an increase in the number of students that are physically active during recess
  • 86% reported a decrease in incidents of bullying
  • 87% reported a decrease in disciplinary referrals
  • 88% reported a decrease in the number of conflicts originating on the playground and spilling over to class
  • 85% reported a reduction in the amount of time transitioning from recess to classroom instruction.
  • 89% reported an increase in students’ abilities to focus on class activities.

If you work in education, or you have a friend who does, you should tell them about this organization because they could get on the waiting list to bring Playworks to their school. Even if an educator’s school isn’t a fit for whatever reason, they should at least check out the section of the Playworks website where they have a database of hundreds of playground games that you can sort by the age they’re intended for, the length of gameplay, the number of players, etc.

Jill Vialet, CEO and Founder of Playworks.

I shot a few questions to Vialet to learn more about what kind of impact the program is having and how she saw her organization in the context of the games for change movement.

WPG4C: Why do children need help with play? Has the structure, or lack of structure for recess always been so problematic?

JV: Kids have always needed guidance in learning how to play well with one another.  When I was growing up we had significant unsupervised time outside where the older kids in the neighborhood taught the younger kids the rules to games, conflict resolution tools like rock-paper-scissors, and where they modeled behaviors that helped keep games going, like self-handicapping (for example, switching players on teams to help make them more even).  With fewer opportunities for unsupervised play, a conscious effort to teach the culture of play to younger kids is now essential to ensuring kids have that capacity.

WPG4C: On the Playworks website, it says that there are diminishing opportunities for unsupervised play in our society? Why is that the case?

JV: There are a number of reasons: in lower income communities there is often a justifiable concern around safety.  For more affluent communities, competing time demands mean that kids often have less unstructured time, and certainly less unsupervised time.

WPG4C: Why is it particularly important to have a program like Playworks at low-income schools?

JV: Students in low-income schools are disproportionately less likely to have recess and access to other out-of-school-time physical activity.

WPG4C: Could you share an anecdote of how a new approach to play helped change the climate at a particular school?

JV: A few years ago we launched our program at a school in San Jose, California.  It was going along and I hadn’t heard much of anything until I got an email from the principal saying that she was blissed out with the program and knew that it was a huge success because there was no longer graffiti happening in the bathroom.  I am used to taking credit for all sorts of good things happening at schools, but this one was something I’d never heard before so I called to get more information.

It turned out that prior to Playworks, boys were bored during recess and going into the bathroom to tag.  It had gotten so bad that the principal had been compelled to put a teacher on duty at the bathroom door during recess to prevent it.  With Playworks, the students were all happily engaged and the teachers were quite happily relieved of bathroom guard duty.

WPG4C: When you first started Playworks, what was your own learning curve like? What types of things are you still discovering work well or don’t work well?

JV: I had no idea that the idea behind Playworks tapped into such a large-scale need. My original thought was that I was creating a local solution to what I perceived to be a local need. We took a lot of time in the beginning to focus on improving the program in the schools, and we’re always experimenting with new games and pilot programs, but by and large, we’re pretty focused on what we know how to do well, and disciplined about doing only that.

More recent learnings have been around working with grown-ups, regional differences and demands, and building out our training business with an eye towards contributing to a movement to ensure that every child in America gets to play every day.

WPG4C: If you had to isolate a few core mechanics of the types of play that contribute to a positive school environment, what would they be?  

JV: 1. Mapping the yard and setting clear expectations for everyone.

2. Giving kids concrete conflict resolution skills and tools like Rock-Paper-Scissors.

3. Taking the time to teach kids the rules to games.

4. Giving the students the opportunity to lead and be in charge of their own play, and

5. Encouraging grown-ups to play alongside kids.

WPG4C: What’s your feeling about cooperative versus competitive games? Do competitive games inherently lead to more behavioral problems, or are their healthy and unhealthy forms of competition?

JV: I don’t think it’s really a matter of competitive vs. cooperative games, you need both, and there is a time and place for both. Competitive games introduced in a developmentally inappropriate way can lead to behavioral problems, but then again, cooperative games coordinated in a developmentally inappropriate way can too.

WPG4C: Do you see Playworks’ work as being part of the games for change movement?

JV: I’ve always maintained that playing games, board games, video games, and outdoor physical games, is all a part of play.  Like the false dichotomy between competitive and cooperative games, I think that pitting video games against physical play is a mistake. There are great, creative games online and there are some bad ones. The games for change movement stands for promoting healthy play and, by definition, Playworks is aligned with that vision.

WPG4C: What do you see as the next steps, beyond sheer physical expansion, for Playworks as an organization? Do you think a model like this could be beneficial for older students?

JV: The goal of Playworks has never been to build the biggest possible organization, but rather to seed a movement to make it possible for every child in America to get to play every day.  Our key understanding is that play is essential to our health and wellbeing as humans.  We’re starting with kids, but in the end, everyone will benefit if play is recognized as the keystone human activity that actually is.

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